When Carter had finished his letter, he dropped into a large chair, and we started to talk—a conversation which was mostly one-sided. He told me Patton had been very much pleased to find, when he reached the library, that the young woman who had been Warren's secretary was there. She had promised to work with him, and, as she knew more about the library than Patton did, her offer had taken quite a load off his mind. Then he suddenly said that he thought he knew why the Chinaman had not taken the box of opium away when he discovered Warren murdered.
That had been one of the things which had puzzled me, that is, if we were to accept the story the man had told as being true. He had found the door of the library open, and Warren dead. The box of opium was his reason for being there; yet he had not taken it, and it had been on the stand all the time. That had rather puzzled me, and when Carter said he thought he knew why it had been untouched, naturally I asked his reason.
“Well,” he grinned, “it is what they call in the mystery yarns ‘deduction.’ Now, of course, he must have known there was a box in the library which contained opium. He must have known that.”
“Right you are,” came a voice from the doorway, and Ranville came into the room and dropped into the nearest chair.
“All right then,” retorted Carter seriously. “But if he did not take it away with him, it was because he did not know which one of the three boxes it was.”
“Not so good,” was Ranville's dry comment. He threw one leg over his knee and added: “He might not have been very sure when he went in. But I wager that he knew before he went out.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It is very simple to me. He told the gardener to bring him the box near the safe. That was the right one as we discovered. If he did not take the box away, there was a reason why he could not; some one must have been approaching the library or else he did not care to be seen with the large box under his arm.”
Carter at length agreed this might be so, and after a while he went up to his room. Ranville and myself talked a few moments, and then he went over to the desk to write a letter. In my chair I dreamed away the moments. The afternoon wore away, and in the silence of the library I half dozed—dozed, to be awakened by a muttered oath from Ranville. As I gave a start, it was to see him looking at a piece of paper in his hand. As his eyes met mine, he said, with a rather sheepish expression on his face:
“What a confounded ass I have been!”